Feeding millions of people in Yemen: Taking on the Identity Crisis

Yemen has been an important part of the great kingdoms and dynasties that have shaped the Arabian Peninsula and Africa for thousands of years. Even though Yemen was officially reunified in 1990 and peace talks have been going on since 2016, the country's government, economy, and people are all in a mess because of the constant fighting that started when the British left the north in 1967.

Even though there is less violence, many people are still going hungry. A 2019 United Nations report says that more than 75% of Yemen's population, or more than 24 million people, need food and other forms of humanitarian aid. When you think about the fact that 40% of the population is under 15 years old, you can see how bad this problem really is.

Getting past identity problems to help others

Even though the biggest humanitarian food aid group in the world was sent to Yemen to help with the crisis, they quickly realized they couldn't help unless the country fixed its identity problems.

In many countries, birth certificates, driver's licenses, voter registration, proof of citizenship, and Social Security cards are common and easy to get, so the idea of "identification" is taken for granted. We at M2SYS, on the other hand, know that this is not the case in Yemen. We know that their ways of identifying people and keeping track of their records are either very old or don't exist at all because we built their biometric voter registration database.

For food aid to be given out efficiently in Yemen, it is important to know exactly where and who needs it.

There were a lot of problems. Yemen has been torn apart by both internal and foreign wars, which have made people's lives worse and messed up food production and distribution networks. There was also no reliable national ID database or legal framework for identifying people. Millions of people were forced to find safety in their own country because of the wars. Bad people in the country had also started to "game the system" of aid, which meant that food and money were going to the wrong people.

Without good information about "who" and "where" the problem is, it would be hard to come up with and implement a good food aid system.

The nonprofit saw that it was important to be able to identify and verify the household head and adult members of each beneficiary family group. To do this, it paid for the creation of a biometric system. With the biometric database, food can only be given to households where the head of the household has been registered, or where they have chosen a representative. This commonsense plan is meant to stop waste, fraud, and abuse, and it helps make sure that aid goes to people who really need it. In many areas where people are starving, it is common for criminals to steal food from NGOs so they can sell it on the black market.

The way out is for all national biometric information to be kept in one place.

The head of each family must sign up with a fingerprint scanner, which then adds all 10 fingerprints to a central database. If you want to enroll someone or make sure they are who they say they are, you should have a record of their fingerprints.

Once the records are in the database, they are copied to make sure that no one has been added more than once. When a client comes to a distribution center, use a single fingerprint to confirm who they are. This method stops fraud and misuse of aid by making sure that only people who have signed up to get food for their families actually get that food.

M2SYS Technology has worked with a wide range of integrators, partners, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and government agencies over the past 20 years to successfully complete over 100 government projects. System integrators can change our M2SYS eGov platform to meet the needs of any digital transformation project for a government anywhere in the world. It has robotics, AI, and biometrics built right in, and it can talk to any other platform without any problems. If you connect your current systems to our engine, integrators can make changes in a matter of hours to things like identification criteria, process automation, user interfaces, and more.

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